Tag: Chilling Effects

While we wait for Judge Guirola to rule: An act of cowardice

Those of you that have been regular Slabbed readers understand that earlier this year Charles Leary and Vaughn Perret, Aaron Broussard’s business agents based in Nova Scotia used a Canadian court order to shut down the Slabbed website.  I got the site back up and going with a new web host with the old site left at WordPress.com, which is owned by San Francisco based Automattic.  Automattic was named a co-defendant of mine in Leary and Perret’s latest endeavor in libel tourism via a SLAPP suit that alleges defamation because I published public court documents which revealed what they were up to in the SLAPP suit they filed against Fox 8 in connection with their coverage of Broussard’s use of the resort at Trout Point Nova Scotia as a conduit for bribery.

The suit is pure legal jackassery but Leary and Perret are using it to full effect as Automattic has deleted the old Slabbed WordPress site, without any advance communication.

The last time Leary and Perret used copy write troll techniques along with a Canadian court order Slabbed was knocked completely offline back in February and it took  herculean effort on my part to get the blog back up and going.  The fact a foreign court order was used to abridge the first amendment rights of thousands of readers and this sites commenters is astounding but it is what it is folks.

There are a couple of things Slabbed readers can do.  The first one would be to blow off what I’m writing because it is not your fight after all.  Then after the site has been knocked offline you can bombard me with emails wondering what the hell happened to the website.  Another thing, what I’ll term a constructive thing, would be to publicize this by letting the media outlets of your own choosing know what is happening.  You see I can move Slabbed to servers in the old USSR where Canadian court orders are meaningless but there is something wrong with having to move an acclaimed website overseas to preserve our first amendment rights. Surely there is a web host here in the US that will resist the efforts of corrupt libel tourists.

Meantime it is clear Automattic understands only one thing so if that is the way it’s gotta be……

Repost: Setting the bar in the court of public opinion

The series of events that have transpired in the NOLA political landscape as of late have me thinking about politics, justice, the media and how they all interact. Since the storm, we’ve seen local media and law enforcement entities focus their attention on rooting out corruption among political offices and governmental agencies. Recently we’ve seen the local media shift their focus, thanks to Fred Heebe, on possible “corruption” (that doesn’t necessarily mean illegality) within the local U.S Attorneys’ Office, itself.

And thanks to the Newhouse cull we’ve even seen local media, for a brief moment, reluctantly turn the spotlight on itself and this is the matter I want to address in this post.

We saw panel after panel discussing what the effects of the Times-Picayune “downsizing” would be, as well as numerous editorial pieces from local blogs like this one to the national media outlets like the NYT. Occasionally, issues of possible ethical matters among our local media resources were discussed in some of those conversations but all in all that particular discussion was a rarity. I suppose that’s because it’s rather uncomfortable for media folk to turn the lens on themselves or the entity writing their paychecks and question matters of integrity.

Perhaps the most outstanding moment in the past few years where this issue arose was the discovery that WWL talk radio host, Garland Robinette, took a 100k loan from River Birch landfill operator, Fred Heebe. Continue reading……..